The Georgetown Metropolitan

Last week, Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh publicly floated a proposal to create a new middle school for Ward 3.  This would dramatically affect Georgetown families, as discussed below.

Citing overcrowding, Cheh wrote in a letter to the Current this week that “the problem at the middle school level seems to be a lack of capacity.” She suggests as a solution the construction of a new school at the Palisades Recreation Center. She also mentioned the possibility of expanding the Mann School. It’s so early at this point, though, that Cheh doesn’t really have a “plan” so to speak and is open to other suggestions for locations.

The good news for Georgetown: the plan would lump them in with the Ward 3 elementary schools that currently feed in Hardy like Hyde-Addison does (Mann, Key, and Stoddert). So if this theoretical new middle school is constructed, Georgetown students would have a right to attend it, even though it would be in another ward (ward boundaries don’t really have much to do with school boundaries). This seems somewhat obvious, but there is always a remote possibility that DCPS would break Hyde off from the other schools and have Hyde students flow up to Francis-Stevens in the West End (which would be a much closer school than a Palisades-based school).

The story behind this story has already been well told by Mike Debonis:

While parents at Lafayette and Janney and Hearst have some comfort in knowing their kids are entitled to a spot at Deal, parents at Mann and Key and Stoddert have less certainty that Hardy is the right place for their kids…That was the subtext of Michelle Rhee’s effort to remake Hardy (which is actually in Ward 2) from an application-only [GM note: Hardy was never application only] arts-focused school attended mostly by out-of-boundary kids to a more traditional neighborhood middle school. At this point, after all the fury, some Ward 3 parents just don’t want to mess with Hardy any more.

Cheh puts a different spin on this dynamic. She states that what Hardy has become to out-of-boundary students is too precious to take away by making it more into a neighborhood-serving school:

[Hardy’s] arts-focused curriculum does not appeal to a sufficient number of Ward 3 parents. If the school’s structure were changed to attract Ward 3 families, then Hardy would no longer have room for many of the out-of-boundary students who thrive there and benefit from the school’s quality education.

In other words: “it looks good on you though“. Continue reading →